Rubens and Brueghel often painted on each other's canvas, Brueghel supplying landscape backgrounds for Rubens' pictures, and Rubens the figures for Brueghel's landscapes. Yet Rubens himself was the best landscapist of the Flemish school. He was more than that. For Brueghel and his followers, with all their patience and industry, their blue-green landscape with imaginary trees, boundless distance and endless detail, were very far from a true grasp of Nature. It was Rubens and his school who really made landscape a legitimate independent branch of art. They studied it in all its aspects, quiet and homely, wild and romantic, some taking one and some the other: Rubens himself, in his large way, grasping the whole without losing sight of its parts. They all lifted the veil from Nature and saw her as she was (Falke).
Brueghel put off the execution of a picture for which he had a commission from winter to spring, that he might study the flowers for it from Nature when they came out, and did not grudge a journey to Brussels now and then to paint flowers not to be had at Antwerp. There is a characteristic letter which he sent to the Archbishop of Milan with a picture:
'I send your Reverence the picture with the flowers, which are all painted from Nature. I have painted in as many as possible. I believe so many rare and different flowers have never been painted before nor so industriously. It will give a beautiful effect in winter; some of the colours almost equal Nature. I have painted an ornament under the flowers with artistic medallions and curiosities from the sea. I leave it to your reverence to judge whether the flowers do not far exceed gold and jewels in colour.'
He also painted landscapes in which people were only accessory, sunny valleys with leafage, golden cornfields, meadows with rows of dancing country folk or reapers in the wheat.
Rubens, though he felt the influence of southern light and sunshine as much as his fellows who had been in Italy, took his backgrounds from his native land, from parts round Antwerp, Mechlin, and Brussels. Foliage, water, and undulating ground were indispensable to him--were, to a certain extent, the actual bearers of the impression he wished to convey.
Brueghel always kept a childlike attitude, delighting in details, and proud of the clever brush which could carry imitation to the point of deception. Rubens was the first to treat landscape in a bold subjective way. He opened the book of Nature, so to speak, not to spell out the words syllable by syllable, but to master her secret, to descend into the depths of her soul, and then reflect what he found there--in short, he fully understood the task of the landscape painter. The fifty landscapes of his which we possess, contain the whole scale from a state of idyllic repose to one of dramatic excitement and tension. Take, for instance, the evening scene with the rainbow in the Louvre, marvellous in its delicate gradations of atmospheric tone, and the equally marvellous thunderstorm in the Belvedere at Vienna, where a rain-cloud bursts under sulphur lightning, and a mountain stream, swollen to a torrent and lashed by the hurricane, carries all before it--trees, rocks, animals, and men.
In France, scarcely a flower had been seen in literature since the Troubadour days, not even in the classical poetry of Corneille and Racine. There were idyllic features in Fénelon's Telemachus, and Ronsard borrowed motives from antiquity; but it was pastoral poetry which blossomed luxuriantly here as in Italy and Spain.
Honoré d'Urfé's famous Astrée was much translated; but both his shepherds and his landscape were artificial, and the perfume of courts and carpet knights was over the whole, with a certain trace of sadness.
The case was different with French painting. After the Netherlands, it was France, by her mediæval illustrated manuscripts, who chiefly aided in opening the world's eyes to landscape. Both the Poussins penetrated below the surface of Nature. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) painted serious stately subjects, such as a group of trees in the foreground, a hill with a classic building in the middle, and a chain of mountains in the distance, and laid more stress on drawing than colour. There was greater life in the pictures of his brother-in-law, Caspar Doughet, also called Poussin; his grass is more succulent, his winds sigh in the trees, his storm bends the boughs and scatters the clouds.
It was Claude Lorraine (1600-1682) who brought the ideal style to its perfection. He inspired the very elements with mind and feeling; his valleys, woods, and seas were just a veil through which divinity was visible. All that was ugly, painful, and confused was purified and transfigured in his hands. There is no sadness or dejection in his pictures, but a spirit of serene beauty, free from ostentation, far-fetched contrast, or artificial glitter. Light breezes blow in his splendid trees, golden light quivers through them, drawing the eye to a bright misty horizon; we say with Uhland, 'The sky is solemn, as if it would say "this is the day of the Lord."'